A leader who brags about sexually assaulting women, such as Donald Trump, or who used to be a member of the KGB, such as Vladimir Putin, or who has confessed to serial murder in a manner decidedly bereft of the repentant tone one would normally expect of a confession, such as Rodrigo Duterte, or who is even just a little cold and a little mean to people, such as Margaret Thatcher or Stephen Harper, is easily imagined pushing civil liberties aside when those liberties stand between themselves and power, as civil liberties tend to do.

Those who oppose unlikable leaders may anticipate rights violations of some sort or another. And when violations occur, they won’t be forgiven. Forgiveness would not only be a matter of forgiving a mistake, but of forgiving the personality type that makes violations predictable rather than merely possible. The violations aren’t committed in error or a moment of weakness: they seem to be the natural behaviour of a certain kind of jerk.

In part, this may explain why this week thousands of Japanese protesters resisted legislation that criminalizes the plotting of crimes rather than the commissioning of it. The legislation is draconian in its own right, reminiscent of the country’s Second World War-era “thought police.” It ought to be resisted no matter who pushed it through. But that it was pushed through by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a man so stubbornly provocative that he will visit a shrine to soldiers who committed war crimes against Japan’s neighbours, could only have put the people of Japan on high alert.

And it may explain why Canadians seem not terribly concerned with Trudeau’s foot-dragging on overhauling Bill C-51, a piece of free-speech-repressing, privacy-violating and due-process-flouting legislation that they were very concerned about indeed when Harper pushed it through. People forgave Trudeau when he voted for the bill. They may forgive him for failing to fix it.

Assurances have certainly been given that he will fix it. “We will repeal the problematic elements of Bill C-51” the Liberals say. But while the government has hastened to promise that it will discard those things that are unpleasant and replace them with things that are pleasant, it hasn’t made nearly as much haste in determining precisely what those things are.

To be fair, it has promised it will clarify the definition of “terrorist propaganda,” even if it has not clarified how it will do so. It has promised it will respect the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as respect public views, even if it has not said what it will do if in the public view rights and freedoms aren’t worthy of much respect. And it has, of course, promised that it will do all this eventually, at some point, presumably just as soon as it has decided which “problematic” elements of Bill C-51 will be most problematic to the Liberal brand.

It’s often been noted, most recently by Chantal Hébert, that on matters of democratic process the public didn’t trust Harper to respect checks on his power. Trudeau can apparently not only be entrusted with powers that can be abused, but so far can be forgiven when he does in fact seem to abuse them.

This is disturbing enough when it comes to failing to appoint watchdogs. It’s alarming to imagine this pattern holding where civil liberties are concerned. For a while, though, it may: Above all else, the Liberal government strives to convey that it is non-threatening, a quality perfectly personified by a smiling, boyish, feminist prime minister. It’s difficult to imagine a yoga-practitioner cracking down on protests.

But if Trudeau makes a habit of failing to protect civil liberties and is thus at least complicit in the violation of them, he may want to bear one thing in mind: As much as people may not like nasty, aggressive leaders, they’re even less forgiving of being tricked into thinking that a leader is different than he really is.

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